Marguerite is chiefly remembered as the author of the _Heptameron_, which modern sentiment cannot help regarding as a collection of scandalous, not to say licentious, tales. The incongruity, as it appears to us, of making such tales the vehicle of moral and even of evangelical instruction, causes us frequently to forget the conversations which follow the stories--conversations which generally inculcate moral truths, and sometimes wander round the evangelical thought that man's salvation and all the fruits of holy living rest on the finished work of Christ, the only Saviour. "_Voilà, Mesdames, comme la foy du bon Comte ne fut vaincue par signes ne par miracles extérieurs, sachant très bien que nous n'avons qu'un Sauveur, lequel en disant Consummatum est, a monstré qu'il ne laissoit point à un autre successeur pour faire notre salut._"[167] So different was the sentiment of the sixteenth from that of the twentieth century, that Jeanne d'Albret, puritan as she undoubtedly was, took pains that a scrupulously exact edition of her mother's _Contes_ should be printed and published, for all to read and profit by. The Reformers with whom Marguerite was chiefly associated were called the "group of Meaux." Guillaume Briçonnet,[168] Bishop of Meaux, who earnestly desired reform but dreaded revolution, had gathered round him a band of scholars whose idea was a reformation of the Church by the Church, in the Church, and with the Church. They were the heirs of the aspirations of the great conciliar leaders of the fifteenth century, such as Gerson, deeply religious men, who longed for a genuine revival of faith and love. They hoped to reconcile the great truths of Christian dogma with the New Learning, and at once to enlarge the sphere of Christian intelligence, and to impregnate Humanism with Christian morality.